Chapter 1: The Data

Video games becoming an increasingly popular and mainstream source of entertainment. With this surge of gaming, many people gain the desire to develop games. Unfortunately, knowing where to start is a task all of its own. One of the biggest decisions to make is which game engine to create your game in. Two of the most popular open source game engines are Unity and Unreal. I gathered the data we will look at in this blog post through Wikipedia and Steam. This data contains information such as the number of positive, negative, and total game reviews, game prices, ratings, etc. I have added the price columns, along with the available platforms, for a more rich analysis. The main topics that will be discussed are games that support Mac OS and differences between Unity and Unreal games.

Chapter 2: Platform

The first variable we are going to look at is what platforms are used the most. While I have the data for windows, linux, and mac, I was most curious about the mac (since that is what I use). A scatter plot and summary table of mac game prices, positive reviews, and negative reviews are found below.

It appears that overall games that appear on the mac os are cheaper than when they are not available on mac. This is most likely due to the fact that a lot of Triple A games are only available on Windows. However, it is interesting that overall there are more positive reviews for Mac than not Mac.

Chapter 3: Engine

The main aspect I wanted to learn about is differences between the different game engines, Unity and Unreal. Below are some of the summary statistics for the differences between Unity and Unreal.

One of the main takeaways from these tables is overall, it appears that Unity is performing better than Unreal. The mean prices are lower than Unreal (as seen from this graph as well):

The mean positive reviews are also greater for Unity than Unreal:

While there are more variables and aspects to take into account, price and number of positive reviews seem to be some of the more important aspects to consider.

Final Chapter: Conclusion

After viewing a few aspects of the data, it seems that Unity performs a little better in terms of pricing and ratings than Unreal. While these are not the only aspects to consider, they are some important aspects. Every person will need to decide for themselves if Unity or Unreal is better for them, but for the sample I have, it looks like Unity performs somewhat better.

If you are interested in seeing the code used for this post, or the plots and tables created, check out my GitHub repository here.

Title Photo

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash